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Welcome to the New Healthcare Law Center and State News

The new healthcare law, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), represents comprehensive healthcare reform legislation signed into law on March 23, 2010. It contains numerous provisions designed to protect consumers and promote low cost medical insurance, including many new taxes to pay for the cost.

In this section of the site, you can also obtain the following information specific to your state: available medical insurance options, efforts to regulate medical insurance premiums, healthcare, the individual medical insurance marketplace and the new healthcare law.

Our objective is to help Americans make sense of the new healthcare law by explaining key provisions in plain English and assisting individuals, families and the self-employed in using this information to find and secure affordable medical insurance.

Doctors Brace for Medicare Pay Cuts in December 2010

Many doctors will stop taking Medicare cases if Congress allows looming cuts to go through. The scheduled reduction in reimbursement rates have raised alarms that real damage to Medicare could result if the lame-duck Congress winds up in a partisan standoff and fails to act by Dec. 1, 2010. That’s when an initial 23 percent reduction would hit.

According to the Associated Press neither Democrats nor newly empowered Republicans want the sudden cuts, but there’s no consensus on how to stave them off. The debate over high deficits complicates matters, since every penny going to doctors will probably have to come from cuts elsewhere. A reprieve of a few months may be the likeliest outcome. That may not reassure doctors.

Doctors have muddled through with temporary reprieves for years. This time, medical groups estimate that as many as two-thirds of doctors would stop taking new Medicare patients, throwing the government run health program for 46 million older and disabled people into turmoil just when the first Baby Boomers will become eligible. Health care for military service members, known as Tricare, would be jeopardized because the payments are tied to Medicare.

There’s widespread recognition the way Medicare pays doctors is flawed because it rewards sheer volume of services, not quality results. But there’s no agreement on a better way. So in the 1990s lawmakers devised a formula for cuts as an automatic braking system to keep Medicare humming along at a sustainable growth rate. Except every time costs went up, they hit the override button. Repealing the formula now would cost more than $280 billion over 10 years.

The American Medical Association is calling for a 13-month reprieve that would give Congress time to work on a new payment system; the administration supports that approach.

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